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“Were the engines engaged?” he asked.

“Negative,” Knowles shouted back. “Nothing. The engine room reported we were in standby mode. Impulse only.”

None of this makes any sense, Harry thought, and shook his head. Something’s wrong with me.

“What hit us, Harry?” Captain Janeway asked, but her words were slightly slurred. “What can the sensor logs tell us?”

Sensor logs. Good idea. “Checking, Captain,” he said. “Scans say that four minutes ago…” Four minutes? Only four minutes? “Four minutes ago we were hit by an energy wave that emanated from the surface of Moronha…. Sorry, Monorha…The surge covered most of the northwestern hemisphere. I can’t make sense of what the scans are saying. There was a shock wave in the atmosphere, but none of that reached us up here.”

“A shock wave caused by what?” the captain asked. “In the atmosphere? On the surface? How powerful? Was anyone on the surface injured?”

Harry shook his head in frustration, his thoughts sluggish. “I can’t tell, Captain.”

“An underground test, perhaps?”

“Possible,” Harry said. He knew that they used to do underground nuclear tests back on Earth before someone figured out the effects such blasts had on the biosphere.

“What about the shuttles?”

Shuttles? Harry shook his head again and was tempted to smack his own face. “Shuttles,” he said aloud. “Wait. Sorry, Captain, let me check.”

“We’re all feeling it, Harry,” she said, “but shake it off. I need you to focus.”

The turbolift doors snapped open and two crewmen and Tuvok stepped off the car. Pointing the crewmen at Grench, Tuvok called, “Is everyone else all right?”

“None of us is great,” the captain said, “but we’re still here. Take care of the ensign.”

The Bolian was already on the stretcher and was floating through the doors guided by the crewmen. Harry was glad to see him getting help, glad that sickbay had been able to respond so quickly.

“Shall I stay on the bridge, Captain? I am not as disabled by the problem plaguing the ship as some others.” But Harry could see that “not as disabled” didn’t mean “unaffected.” There were dark circles under Tuvok’s eyes, evidence of the strain he was experiencing.

“Stay, Tuvok. Harry is examining the sensor logs, but I want you to check the shields. If this disorientation is caused by something external…”

Tuvok didn’t even respond, but stepped up to his station and began checking shields.

“The shuttles, Harry.”

Shuttles. Right. He did the simple thing first and checked the shuttlebay logs. “Commander Chakotay and his party were on board when the energy surge hit, Captain. Looks like he’s okay, though the bay forcefields flickered. Some debris got sucked out.”

“No crewmen though?”

“No, everyone is accounted for.”

“What about B’Elanna and Seven?”

Harry searched the logs for a sign of the second shuttle’s fate. There they are approaching the atmosphere. Here’s their signature crossing into the daylight side of the hemisphere. And then…“I don’t know, Captain. I see them getting tossed by the same surge, but I can’t tell what happened. The shuttle didn’t break up, but I can’t determine what else might have happened after we were hit.”

“But hit by what, Ensign?” Captain Janeway snapped, rising from her chair. “Where are we? Where are the stars?!”

Dumbstruck, staring, Harry ran his hands over the control panel, trying to make sense of what was happening. The captain is shouting at me, he thought. This wasn’t the first time it had happened and Harry knew that he wasn’t so thin-skinned that a shout should bother him so much, but he was all too conscious of the fact that he was close to breaking into tears. It’s this space, he thought. There’s something wrong with it. But the scanners can’t scan it.

A new idea struck him: Maybe the scanners were out of calibration. Maybe the energy surge blew out the configuration files and all he needed to do was do a reset. I’ll do that, he thought. I’ll reset them and everything will work and I’ll figure this out and the captain won’t yell at me anymore.

The